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The sun rose over Mount Sinai, illuminating the other-worldly landscape and imbuing the unusually thin parchment with a translucent glow. Reciting the Ten Commandments on the spot in Egypt that represents perhaps the best guess of where God, according to tradition, revealed the law to Moses amounted to a sort of homecoming for a 200-year-old Torah scroll, recalled Rabbi Marcia...

Thousands of miles of ocean and the better part of a continent separate Philadelphia from Kampala, Uganda, but for two individuals of different faiths, Israel has provided a way to bridge that considerable gap. Andrea Gottlieb of Merion serves as director of Jerusalem Online University -- a New York-based, online learning program with offices in Philadelphia and Jerusalem. For the...

It was a beautiful spring night almost 30 years ago when I first experienced the counting of the Omer. As our seder on the second night of Passover came to a close, our host invited everyone out onto his redwood deck. There, under the full moon, he offered thanks, blessed the moment and said, "Today is the first day of...

Cantor Arlyne Unger readily sings the praises of the Jewish education she received at Gratz College. The 55-year-old, who serves in the dual roles of education director and chazzan at Beth Tikvah B'nai Jeshurun, a Conservative synagogue in Erdenheim, started out studying at Gratz's Hebrew high school as a teen. She also took undergraduate courses at the college and, years...

When Benjamin Sacks steps up to the bimah for his Bar Mitzvah in 2016, he and his family plan to use the blue yad -- or Torah pointer -- the 6-year-old made with modeling clay during a recent hands-on workshop. For now, the pointer -- adorned with bubbles, lightning strikes and rockets -- occupies pride of place in the Sacks...